| I think it's not so much that academics don't value aesthetics or don't want to change as that the alternates are NOT _strictly_ better. It's all tradeoffs. And we are used to changing template to submit to different journals, so it's not that much of an issue. Extensive or summarised background? -- You don't want extensive background material padding every paper out with several more pages, so once you're familiar with 'the literature' (the key background details), often you can quickly skim and get an idea of the baseline of the paper just from specific citations Citation formats? -- some citation formats are better than others...I usually publish in journals using IEEE/numeric, which can be denser but requires flicking to the Bibliography...names can make it easier to recall the gist of a paper if it's a famous one like the 'Hinton' or whatnot, but can really pad out content if you have strings of names inline Papers too short/page limits? -- You don't want pages and pages of content, otherwise the paper is likely contributing _more than one idea_, and so is less focused (and also kind of dilutes the review process). If a paper contributes A and B, but B is weak, do you still let it through if A is great? If the contributions are distinct, you can easily have an A paper and then request some more work for B. 2-column? -- 2-column and dense can make it easier to quickly jump from section to section, or get more information on a single page...so when reading in print format (or digitally with full-page view), you can easily see what was said earlier on a page, whereas 1-column tends to have much larger font so less content-dense. I don't think we are at optimum, but I don't think ANY new format that's been proposed gives such a noticeable benefit to some of these areas as to overtake. Fully digital with hovers and links and stuff may be useful, but would completely regress when printed out for reading and annotating. |